Even if it can, we can only identify a very wide set of reasons that can interpret the outputs. But what is root cause, that is a very deep rabbit hole.
Let’s say a guy got electrocuted while showering. I can say that the cause is the guy going for a shower. For others the cause is the electric wiring system failure.
Marx foresaw and correctly predicted the rise of what he calls "organic composition of capital" (simplifying, machines and automated production) and the diminishing of human labour.. which can also be seen as accumulated past (dead) labour over living labour.
We are now seeing an almost literal realization of this passage:
The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper
What Marx didn't imagine AFAIK, was fully autonomous machines that not only can reproduce themselves but that they can also use guns (and surveillance, prediction, germs, etc) against all humanity, transcending capitalist relationships and potentially controlled by a single master (hi Elon) or none (Skynet), without workers involvement. That kind of machine is outside Marx analysis but doesn't contradict it. We are seeing the first glimpses of it in the AI systems used to execute the Gaza genocide. In such scenario who controls the ASI controls the world, more like Hitler with an Aladdin's lamp than the metabolism and historical evolution described in Das Kapital we saw until now.
As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
The comment was paraphrasing the message of the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which Bradbury used for the title of his story), which is exactly about this: that Nature won't know or care when we're gone.
I see this a lot, and I think it's sort of naive. Nature itself is doomed due to the way the universe works. It's also far more brutal and arbitrary than we could imagine being. The only way to even have a chance at avoiding the doom that "nature" is facing is for something to evolve that can manipulate and forestall this inevitability.
I don't know if humanity is what can do that, and likely nobody knows. But nature is not going to survive either once you broaden the time horizon a bit.
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. Yes the planet is doomed sooner or later. But I'm talking about nature as in trees, animals, etc. The natural eco-system. And it existed and evolved and adapted naturally long before humans and will continue long after we're gone.
In philosophy there is a debate regarding the meaning of the word nature and if humans should be considered a part of it, and I see the points, but that's a different discussion.
My point is the whole "nature existed and will continue to exist" thing is honestly trite. Nature created us, we're just another output in the universal system. There's no real point behind the whole statement that nature will exist without us, and it contributes nothing to any discussion besides unnecessary smugness.
Of course there's reason to discuss if endless parking lots and industrial complexes are necessary. Claiming they're part of nature is like claiming HIV is a natural part of the human body. It exists yes but maybe we're better off without it?
I see humanity as it exists today as a cancer on the planet and it's not out of smugness. The pursuit of infinite growth is ruining everything that's beautiful around us.
We can discuss the semantics of the word nature all you want but it is just shifting the focus from the actual problem, which is how we destroy everything we touch. Which is also what I'm assuming GP means.
It's the takeaway from the story in OP and the poem with the same title, so I'd say it's very much on-topic. Your only contribution is "acktually, humans are nature too and once the universe collapses everything is doomed" and shut down any other discussion as "silly".
As long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.
The world has been much more inhospitable than it is today and I'm sure it will recover. The problem I see with us is how we destroy everything in our path on an industrial scale. As long as the wheels keep spinning we extract everything we can, see water use for data centers as the latest example.
Other species co-exist in the eco-system, we destroy it.
This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.
So he is against China for its hypothetical usage of AI against civilians but is not against US and Israel that already use AI provided by him to operate a real genocide that kills thousands and thousands of Gaza children in the most horrible ways? Very ethical.
Something important not discussed here is that you need not only error correction (when possible) but also error reporting, so you can know you RAM is failing. Sadly, is not possible to get DDR5 on-die ECC error counts reported to the OS. Alternative solution, use IBECC with DDR5, where the CPU reserves a portion of the RAM for parity bits and does the check / reporting.
Does this imply that the all plastic gamer PCs (that are more designed to be art projects than serious computers) are bad and that everyone should be using systems with solid steel cases to block radiation?
Plastic cases might actually be a bit better than steel depending on the radiation type. Neutron radiation is more effectively shielded by interacting with light atoms so stuff with lots of hydrogen atoms like water or polymers have a better chance of interacting with neutrons and slowing it down so that it can be stopped. Steel is probably better for gamma radiation or charged particles like muons.
But overall, pc cases are probably too thin to appreciably affect the radiation levels. Cosmic rays and their secondary radiation is fine with going through buildings so a 1mm thick case isn't going to do much.
A steel case has too little effect on cosmic radiation, but it is good to shield electrical noise.
The computers in plastic cases can sometimes be affected by appliances with electrical motors that are used nearby them.
The cosmic radiation is attenuated only inside a big building, e.g. one with many stories above you. A really great attenuation is obtained only underground.
Good point. Some googling suggests that plastic may be better than metal as hydrogen absorbs high energy protons without generating secondary radiation.
I would think most servers and workstations would be RDIMM (Registered DIMM) by now and consumer stuff uses soldered down memory. Memory failing because it's old is definitely a thing, and very possible in this scenario, but I feel like I haven't seen errors due to physical insertion, that were not caught immediately by POST, in years.
Curious to learn more here - why would altitude play a role here? And when you say high altitude - are we talking La Paz, Bolivia (~12k feet) or Denver, CO (~5k feet)?
Engineering computer memory to work in space is a whole field of study, see Radiation Hardened memory. The main physical difference about space is the radiation profile and radiation induced memory upset.
Are you disputing that the Earth's atmosphere absorbs and reduces the amount of ambient cosmic radiation? Or where is the skepticism coming from?
Cosmic radiation is always a source of errors for any kind of DRAM.
Whether it is the primary source of errors, depends on the design of the DRAM die.
In a badly designed DRAM there could be many other error causes.
The designers of a DRAM certainly attempt to minimize all the error causes that they can control. If they succeed, the cosmic radiation would remain the primary error source.
Without access to internal documents of the DRAM vendors, we cannot know if they have indeed minimized all other error causes.
In modern DRAM chips, a major error cause can also be the disturbance of some memory cells when some other cells are accessed in their neighborhood, which is the basis of the Rowhammer attacks, but which can also happen during the normal use of the memory, when certain access patterns happen by chance.
The DRAM vendors do not provide details about the behavior of their devices, with the hope that this makes harder the task for someone who wants to design a variant of the Rowhammer attacks, but this also makes impossible for the owner of the memory to predict whether an application program will not perform by chance an access pattern that will unintentionally flip some memory bits, which without ECC will not be detected and corrected.
Companies making DRAM have no incentive to make the best products theoretically possible, they just want them good enough to not get many returns and avoid the risk of a class action lawsuit if a significant pattern of problems appears.
Avoiding returns for ECC DIMMs is a harder challenge when they are used in an environment where the server will have a management system that tracks errors over all time and when there might be a network management system tracking all errors over all systems.
Avoiding returns for non-ECC DIMMs is easy when a few errors per month won't be noticed by most users who assume that Windows always crashes anyway.
Has any DRAM company tested chips and made non-ECC DIMMs from the ones that have lower quality?
As an aside are the 2^N*3 sizes of DDR5 DIMMs (like 24G and 48G) made from chips that had errors in one section and got reconfigured to have 3/4 the capacity to not use the bad parts?
The word "uncorrelated" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that claim. Most DRAM error sources are pretty clearly correlated, if you're paying any attention.
> Corolary: submarine datacenters are much better than orbital datacenters
Yea, except datacenters also need connectivity. And submarine connectivity, while not particularly expensive, is quite vulnerable - even more so than on land.
People outside the US have a significant lack of Internet functionality when there are problems with submarine cables, but it hardly ever fails. Apart from when certain countries sabotage things.
If you only need 100M deep water then you don't need to go far offshore, there are places where it's only about 1KM out. 12M of water is used for storing spent nuclear fuel assemblies and less than half of that is needed for protection so 5M should be adequate for stopping cosmic rays and that depth is common in harbours for recreational boating, such harbours shouldn't have issues of cable breakage.
But the real issue for comparing submarine and orbital computers is cooling. Space is cold but doesn't allow easy transmission of heat.
If only they were as easy to detect as morons. One is easily detectable with a single glass of beer and nothing more. The other, however, needs dry ice, or a pint of beer on a slab of dry ice.
Google reports 8% of DIMMs being affected by errors. While the differences in metrics prevent comparing the two things directly it seems that DRAM errors are more common than CPU errors.
Sounds like an issue with hardware. I watch ECC errors for 2500 servers and see a few some days, and zero others. Said servers at an elevation of 6,000 feet or so. A few per day for a single machine is crazy high. You likely have a dimm, dimm slot, motherboard, or CPU issue that's susceptible to RF noise, vibration, temp changes or similar.
